LEIGH WHANNELL’S WOLF MAN may not have had the same box-office heat as his previous reimagining of a beloved Universal Monster, 2020’s The Invisible Man, but it’s a similarly bold take, dispensing with many of the tropes of the werewolf movie (silver bullets, full moon, a sudden transformation) to tell the tragic story of a family man (Christopher Abbott’s Blake) who is slowly infected with a lycanthropic disease over the course of a single night, much to the horror of his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). “I knew going in, there’s probably a certain contingent of people that are going to be like, ‘This isn’t how a werewolf movie works!’” Whannell tells Empire. “But I felt it was important to do my version of it.” Here, he talks us through the main beats.
THE COLD OPENING
So cold, in fact, that we can see breath on the air. Which is important in this opening sequence, introducing us to young Blake (Zac Chandler) and his father, Grady (Sam Jaeger), as they go on a hunting trip, and end up in a deer blind, possibly being stalked by an unseen wolf man. Unseen, that is, except for the creature’s breath, which appears just behind Grady’s head. “I did something similar in The Invisible Man,” he admits. “With this film, the idea to use breath just organically comes out of, ‘What is a sign that there’s something there?’ We weren’t hanging the whole movie on that concept!”